


Captive

by jusrecht



Category: Super Junior
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-31
Updated: 2012-07-31
Packaged: 2018-01-09 18:49:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1149534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jusrecht/pseuds/jusrecht
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being successful idols and being in love just don't match.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Captive

**Author's Note:**

> This is the result of my frustration over the lack of WonKyu lately. Well, the lack of Siwon period. What’s written down there is best described as a chunk of word vomit because I basically poured everything in my head down to paper. It went through very little editing process if at all, so yes VAGUENESS AHOY! It also probably won’t make much sense unless you know what has been going on in the last four weeks, but in case it’s too confusing, there’s a little explanation for the timeline at the end.
> 
> Written entirely in Kyuhyun’s 2nd POV.

\-----

  
_i._  
  
A prison is not built in a day.  
  
It is a work of time, silent and lethal. It creeps up on you, bar by bar, brick by brick, until all you can see are the black walls of your agony, painted by even blacker despair. A prison traps the soul, not the body.  
  
The rest is simply the work of duality. You begin to long for the sun, for _freedom_. The opposite. It is, after all, human nature.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _ii._  
  
“I think we should break up.”  
  
You have thought about them, these voiceless and wingless words, a thousand times over. This is but one chance when they finally take flight, shaped by tongue and lips, voiced from within. This is truth, and it cuts.  
  
He still has one arm draped across the span of your waist, both of you lying side by side, in a crowded bed, trapped inside an even more crowded head. Weariness settles deep in your bones like a sleeping enemy and there are words still spinning round and round in your head, their waltz listless but endless. _I’m tired. We’re tired. We’re busy. Too busy and too fucking tired. None of these is worth it anymore. You aren’t worth it anymore. I’m not. We aren’t._  
  
His lack of response is an answer enough. You remember a time when he was governed by impulses, leaping from one reaction to another with such dizzying speed that he literally took your breath away. You remember a time when he laughed freely, features etched with laughter lines instead of deep streaks of shadow that now rule over every curve and angle of his face.  
  
The thing is, that person you are in love with no longer exists.  
  
“Alright.”  
  
There, then, is his answer, and it sinks like a deadweight, its echo a hammer striking the last nail to the coffin of whatever this is between the two of you. You release the breath you have unconsciously been holding. He releases the waist he too has unconsciously been holding, and rises from the bed, slowly, a lumbering shadow in the darkness of your room.  
  
This is how the two of you end—seven little words, an ocean of silence, two pairs of tired eyes gazing through the smoke of apathy. A slow, inevitable death. Somehow, you reflect numbly, it is fitting. For hate does not kill.  
  
Indifference does.  
  
He leaves two minutes later, footsteps dragging but quiet. You can still feel him, around you, inside you, a ghost that marks your soul and refuses to leave.  
  
When you wake up the next morning, he is already gone, miles away and a sea in between.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _iii._  
  
Regret is not bitter. It is sour, and the taste is one that never leaves your mouth.  
  
A change is always painful, you tell yourself, but this is better—or at least a road to something better. The pain is not unbearable. You learn to live with it, ignore it, forget it, and nothing is easier with the new album just around the corner. His absence further dulls the pain, the illusion that it is distance, not choice, whereas it was your voice that cut the thread clean.  
  
No one notices, too caught up in their own too-tight schedules and long spells of exhaustion. (For this, at least, you are grateful.) These days, you live each hour like walking on clouds, where nothing is solid enough to matter.  
  
You do not sink into melancholy.  
  
You do not allow yourself pause.  
  
You do not let your eyes linger when they chance upon his name.  
  
You do not look at the empty side of your too-narrow bed.  
  
You do not cry.  
  
After a while, it gets easier.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _iv._  
  
You see him again just before the press conference, tanned and silent and severe and suddenly a stranger.  
  
“You’re right,” he says, eyes deeply penetrating yours. There is very little difference between the way he stares and the way he fucks—but then again, you’re not supposed to think along those lines anymore. “Taking a break is a good choice. We’re too busy and… well, this is better.”  
  
“I’m glad,” is your automatic reply. You cannot tell if he is lying or not—he has become such a good actor, or maybe it is you who refuses to read between the lines.  
  
“So.” He glances down, once, awkwardly shuffling his feet, and then looks up to catch your gaze again, wariness evident in everything he does. “No hard feelings?”  
  
“Of course not,” you mutter, then attempt a smile because it feels like the right thing to do. You hold out your hand, and this is a scene from some drama you watched a long time ago, practiced gestures and scripted lines and so, so fake feelings. “Friends?”  
  
“Friends.” He smiles, suddenly, blindingly bright.  
  
This time, you discover that you knew _nothing_ about regret.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _v._  
  
He no longer touches you except once, under a gleaming spotlight, before a full audience, with a wide grin that crushes two years of _together_ into nothingness.  
  
You feel yourself stiffen, but the moment is too brief to last and his smile when you glances his way is a shade too neutral. Then his hand falls away, and though his warmth lingers even through layers of clothes and sweat, though the summer heat chokes the air surrounding the stage, you can only feel the cold.  
  
He is gone again the next day and the empty space next to you becomes real. Where he should stand is a vacant floor brightened by shafts of sunlight, now filled only by dancing motes of dust. An end is supposed to happen only once. You don’t understand why you have to relive yours again and again.  
  
This is when you learn that regret is not sour. It is bitter—and cannot be so easily dismissed.  
  
Slowly, you learn to breathe through the absence. In, out, filled, unfilled, both treading among the clouds. One day, you will look back and laugh at how easily you have fallen prey to the vicious teeth of regret.  
  
This is, after all, for the better.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _vi._  
  
Hours bleed into days, then weeks. There are shootings and recordings and performances and you drown yourself in them, finding escape in toil, repose in exhaustion. Perhaps somewhere in it, scattered in the braids of hours and events, are glimpses of his name, flashes of his face on giant screens that litter the city.  
  
You look away, every single time.  
  
Then you smile, smile, _smile_ , until it does not hurt anymore  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _vii._  
  
“Please don’t worry. He’s alright.”  
  
Sometimes Leeteuk’s smile is brightest when he lies. You watch him from the corner of your eyes, hidden from the fans’ scrutiny, and wonder if this is one of those times. His smiling face betrays nothing, an entertainer’s mask of long, practiced ease.  
  
The recording ends. The day declines. The night deepens. Only your unease refuses to alter. Later that night, as the clock strikes one and you lie alone in your bed, your stiff, trembling fingers finally yield, typing a short, painstakingly impersonal message into your phone.  
  
 _Where are you?_  
  
You do not send it until the next morning.  
  
No reply ever comes.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _viii._  
  
 _Are you okay?_  
  
It takes you three more days, three sleepless nights, and a battered pride to send the second message. This time, there is no careful wording, no deliberate stalling; only the honest, desperate cry of something from the past, writhing back to life.  
  
Again, no answer breaks the silence of your phone. (You hold it cradled between too-tight fingers, lest you throw it at the opposite wall and watch it crumble into pieces, like your heart.)  
  
Maybe that is when indifference shifts back to something less uncaring—but then you begin to wonder, the pain sharpening again, if it has ever been indifference at all.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _ix._  
  
When you see his name on the display of your phone, you almost do not answer. It has been forty hours since the last message and your hate for him has festered inside for exactly that long. You think you can ignore him if you try long enough.  
  
It keeps ringing, piercing the still darkness of your room. You forget that he is always an exception—has always been, and most likely will always be. Even from a place unknown, he pulls you toward the memory of his smiles. You can never ignore the temptation of his voice.  
  
“Hello?”  
  
Your voice does not quiver, almost. You allow yourself a flash of pride, a tiny sip of delight at so small a triumph, but it does not last long in his lingering silence. The heaviness in your throat grows—like fear—and you swallow against it, rebel against it, armed with nothing else but another tiny question among so many others bursting inside your chest.  
  
“Where are you?”  
  
This time, he discards his pretence at muteness. “I’m fine, don’t worry,” he says, the familiar rasp of his voice seeping, threading into the empty gaps between one heartbeat and another. You bite your lips so hard they bleed, the sweet tang of iron spreading, the sharp sting cutting, distracting you from another kind of agony, flowering deeper within. You lay your head upon a pillow that still smells like him, and remember what it feels like to be in love.  
  
You should have been angry; it would have been justified. Instead, you bask in the quiet, listening to the sound of his silence.  
  
“Please sing something for me,” he says again, quieter, more like a plea than a request. You think of all the times in the past when he has asked you the same, how many times he has used the exact same words, whispering softly in your ear, threading his fingers in your hair, those gentle strokes which are nothing but a ghost of a memory now.  
  
“What song?” you hear yourself ask, to distance yourself from that ghost.  
  
“Anything.”  
  
You do not comply for a long time. Too many melodies tangle in your head, too many memories trailing like shadows in their wake. You cannot remember a song that does not have _him_ in it.  
  
When you finally begin to sing, it is to break the heavy chains wound tightly around your silence, with the song which has been playing on repeat in your head for hours. Ryeowook hummed it in the car earlier that day, so it is chance, not design. But the song is fitting, telling a story about the past and regret and _someday_ and perhaps, perhaps there can be hope for another future, sparkling like bright tiny snowflakes falling from a grey-lined sky, out of one’s reach—but if you just reach out a little, more, a little more, then–  
  
You are not sure when your control slips, or when your voice begins to break. But once the flaw begins, it is unstoppable, like cracks spiderwebbing over ice, and the song is unravelling, the rhythm collapsing into itself as you surrender to the first sobs that wreck your body.  
  
You almost cannot hear the sound of Siwon’s soft weeping above your own.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _x._  
  
Morning always comes, a merciless army marching out of the east.  
  
You have fallen asleep with the phone still pressed to your cheek, lulled by the gentle sound of his breathing. The first thing you do after you have opened your eyes is to look at the list of received calls.  
  
You find his name at the top and a sigh echoes through your body, a whistle of relief. You have not dreamed the entire call.  
  
That is when you realise that you have never left the prison at all. (Love, after all, is never an obliging master.)  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _xi._  
  
He does not call you again.  
  
The days are worse, the ache sharper now, stronger, intensified by the knowing that your wound is nowhere near healed—in fact, still bleeding. You check your phone every twenty minutes and each time, disappointment turns into a knife that carves his name a little deeper. You do not call him either. You do not say that you are still waiting. You do not say that you breathe and taste regret with every passing second. You do not say that life has stopped for you in his absence. You do not say that you now sleep curled on your bed, a fist pressed against the hollow of your stomach, the other side of your narrow bed still untouched.  
  
You do not say that you miss him so fucking much it hurts even to sing.  
  
Sometimes you think this is your deserved punishment, self-flagellation brought to the very end of the spectrum. Sometimes it’s just plain, old cowardice.  
  
Until then.  
  
 _I’m coming home today._  
  
  
–  
  
  
xii.  
  
Your mind has gone blank. For hours you linger behind the front door, counting the quiver of your own breath, in and out, waiting.  
  
For the snap.  
  
For the plunge.  
  
For the moment when he descends from the car and steps into the dorm, wearing a smile that breaks your heart into smithereens, all over again.  
  
You do not speak. You watch from a distance, drinking the sight of him in blissful silence as he greets your dorm mates, one by one. He has changed, in those little things that matter—the once lively gait of his stride, the rich layers of his laugh, now replaced by a solemn turn of mouth and deep marks of gravity around his eyes. They search for you, find you, nail you with their boundless depth that all you can do is watch his slow, deliberate approach.  
  
Hand on your elbow, he guides you into your own room. You do not resist. There is fear still nestling deep within you, but you ignore it, crushing the first stirring of its offspring under your heels. You meet his gaze instead, mind twisting desperately from word to word, phrase to phrase; you have to say something.  
  
Then it does not matter—nothing does—because he is kissing you and it, he, _this_ does not feel like a prison.  
  
“I can’t,” he says, breathes against your lips. “I can’t. I can’t.”  
  
You taste salt on the corner of his mouth as he repeats those two words, over and over again, like a prayer so desperately offered at your altar.  
  
 _Me neither,_ you do not say.  
  
You think he finds the words all the same, mapped all over your body.  
  
  
–  
  
  
 _xiii._  
  
Every morning, you still wake up in the same prison, to the same suffocating fingers around your neck, haunted by the same fear. It still whispers the same stories, shows the same reels of nightmares in the silent hallways and corners of your mind. Perhaps tomorrow you will break, or next week he will, or next month, or next year. It is hard enough to love, let alone to love while being what you are.  
  
The only difference is this: you stumble out of bed after a scant few hours of sleep, the managers’ voices still ringing in your ears, and there are lips pressed against the slope of your shoulder. You pause, tips of your fingers catching locks of his sun-streaked hair, and he smiles, the expression shadowed and thin in the grip of exhaustion, but it is enough to coax a response from the curve of your lips.  
  
Maybe tomorrow that smile will not be enough. Maybe next week it will not even matter, and the two of you will be back on square one before either can blink. Maybe love is impossible for someone like you and this moment is only an illusion that will disperse at the first hint of another storm.  
  
And maybe, just maybe, this will be enough for many years to come—enough to grow old and build lives together with, lives long enough to involve something like counting wrinkles off each other’s face. Maybe this is the beginning of that very long journey, and twenty years from now, you’ll wake up and still find him at your side—and in place of this fragile thread there will be a bridge, beautiful and strong and enduring. Just maybe.  
  
You do not let yourself think about it; you’re not that optimistic.  
  
But somewhere, inside, as he follows you out of bed, fingers reaching and twining with yours, you _hope._  
  
  
 ** _End_**  
  
  
  
---  
  
  


  
**Notes:** A little explanation about the timeline here because I know it's confusing as hell orz

(ii) Somewhere after the SFS MV shooting but before Siwon returned to Taiwan.  
(iv) Press conference July 3rd, 2012  
(v) First Open Concert July 6th, 2012  
(vii) I don't really remember when this happened, but during one of the recordings for their comeback performances, fans asked Leeteuk about Siwon being MIA and his answer was something along that line.  
(ix) Yes, the song Kyuhyun sings is [Someday](http://www.kpoplyrics.net/super-junior-someday-lyrics-english-romanized.html).  
(xii-xiii) When Siwon returns to SJ, a moment which remains elusive to this day ;_;

Everything else is in between. Hopefully it helps :)

Thank you for reading and please comment ♥  



End file.
